Using projections, artworks, spoken word, music, and dance, Newsome continues to push the boundaries of his artistic vision.
Rashaad Newsome
Posted inArt
A Major New Exhibition on Afrofuturism Touches Down Right on Time
This rich history is undercut with urgency, as gentrification is displacing Oakland’s Black population at a staggering rate.
Posted inArt
Rashaad Newsome and Kiyan Williams Talk Art, Inspiration, and Black Magic
As part of Newsome’s new multi-part project with Leslie-Lohman Museum, the pair will discuss their “relationships to soil and earth, WEB Du Bois, and the lie of the American experiment.”
Posted inArt
A Virtual Ballroom Experience, Hosted by Rashaad Newsome
Categories for the annual Art Ball are inspired by specific art movements and artists, and this year will feature looks in the colorful, joyful style of Barkley L. Hendricks paintings.
Posted inPerformance
Reaching for Transcendence with Voice and Light
In Rashaad Newsome’s “Running,” a vocal tradition reaches expressive new heights and plumbs emotional depths.
Posted inArt
Rashaad Newsome Recenters Blackness in Art History
In sculpture and collage, Newsome explores agency, feminism, and what we think we’re looking at.
Posted inArt
The Strange Union of Contemporary Art and the Hudson River School
HUDSON, NY — River Crossings, the recently opened show up at the historic Thomas Cole House and Olana, Frederic Edwin Church’s architectural ode to Orientalism, over-promises and under-delivers.
Posted inArt
Rashaad Newsome Is Having a Ball
Five passages on Rashaad Newsome’s “FIVE (The Drawing Center).”
Posted inArt
Pop Music’s Love Affair with Contemporary Art
For too long there has been a large divide (whether real or imagined) between visual art and music. After all, what we came to call art most likely formed out of traditional ceremonies with music, dance, shrines, costumes, and ritual objects all working together. Now, that boundary is collapsing again.
Posted inArt
Outsider Culture Writ Large
BERKELEY, California — As the grand finale for SFMoMA’s exhibition, Stage Presence, which delved into the theatrical of contemporary art, Rashaad Newsome performed “Shade Compositions” (2005) in Haas Atrium, just inside the museum’s entrance, on October 4. “Shade Compositions” has been an ongoing performance that began with documentation of particular noises and gestures associated with and performed by African-American women. The original performers were entirely African-American women, but Newsome has since expanded his subject matter to cast a different conversation about outsider culture writ large.
Posted inNews
MTV’s New Art Spots Have Potential to Reach 600M Viewers
MTV is trying to rekindle the “visual playground” of the 1980s and they hope the new art commercials by Rashaad Newsome, Mickalene Thomas, Tala Madani, Jani Ruscica and Mads Lynnerup will help them do it.
Posted inArt
Seven Artists Meet Seven Technologists, But Who’s Who?
Seven on Seven is an annual conference hosted by Rhizome and the New Museum that pairs seven artists together with seven technologists to collaborate on projects created in a 24-hour period. The event’s second outing was last Saturday, May 14. The first question that came to my mind while attending the event was — what exactly is a technologist? Through the presentation speeches and Q+A sessions that showed off the series of thought-provoking collaborative artworks, I began to get an inkling of what the word might mean, and what its implications could be. But at a time when new media artists are technological innovators and software developers are artistic creators, where do we draw the line?
